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Beautiful question.

You could also ask if blind people are able to perceive vision in dreams. To which the answer, I believe, is that they simply cannot, due to the fact that their brains have no notion of a visual image.



'...dreaming is a gradual cognitive achievement that requires the development of visual and spatial skills and other forms of imagistic skills as well.'[1]

Those who've never seen, or who were blinded very early, have auditory dreams. (They dream in sounds.) Those who were blinded after the age of around seven -- when the ability to form mental images necessary for dreaming develops -- are able to dream in pictures.

[1] http://psych.ucsc.edu/dreams/Library/kerr_2004.html


I'm not sure about that. Sight happens in the brain. When the eyes don't work this doesn't have to mean the visual part of the brain doesn't work.

Related: https://hackertimes.com/item?id=2185429


I wonder how a brain that has never "seen" an image would percieve technology to allow the blind to see using this:

http://vision.wicab.com/technology/


I suspect we commonly underestimate blind people mental capacities.

One can argue that 'seeing' goes beyond the perception of lights and colors. It's also about shape, so I guess a blind person can perfectly 'visualize' a rectangle, a cube, etc. And probably do geometry, or even 3D-object rotations.

Can anyone confirm this?


I read something recently by a blind guy who said that sometimes he perceived some amount of light in his dreams. This was because his blindness is not complete blindness. There are varying degrees of it. In his case, he could detect some light changes.


This breaks my heart.




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